Despite maturity, the Eastern European TV markets see sluggish adoption of IPTV

If excluding some countries — Croatia, Montenegro and Slovenia — IPTV adoption in the Eastern European markets is still very low, attracting only between 1% and 14% of the households, with Romania, Poland and Russia with the smallest subscriber base. Apart from the strong foothold of CaTV and satellite TV, the sluggish IPTV take-up can be explained with the still low broadband penetration of DSL and FTTx, which limit the potential target market for IPTV.

In Croatia and Slovenia for instance, thanks to a relatively high DSL and FTTx penetration, IPTV also benefited from the terrestrial analogue switchover as IPTV operators were able to win those households who chose the service in search of other digital TV alternatives instead of migrating to DTT.

In Hungary, Magyar Telekom has been reselling its IPTV offers via its own ISPs as a white label service where its ISPs are allowed to name the IPTV offer under their own brand and bundle Magyar Telekom’s IPTV packages along with their broadband offers. With this model, while the ISPs are able to compete more effectively against regional cable companies, Magyar Telekom gains additional sales channels for its IPTV offer. In the Czech Republic, HDD, a me-dia company, follows a similar model but unlike the Hungarian incumbent, not having any infrastructure, it only caters to the various ISPs. HDD is basically in-charge of forging partner-ships for content and securing the broadcasting license from the regulator.